Steppe Into History: Pleasuredromes Of Kubla Khan

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“Very important, historical Khan game”, thecatamites writes, introducing his latest jolly hockysticks adventure, The Pleasuredromes of Kubla Khan. It’s experimental learning, an explorable history lesson with a life of its own that has a rant at Edward Said and then almost literally vanishes up its own backside. There are probably all kinds of gloriously detailed and accurate details to discover but it’s possible to rush through the lesson in five minutes or so if you’re that way inclined. Go and learn!

Use the comments to make a list of all the clever things you learned. I’ll start by admitting that I didn’t realise until now that ancient Mongolia looked like it was coated in pizza topping. This may well be the most ambitious first-person study guide that you play with today.

Since you clicked for more despite there being no promise of a trailer or anything of the sort, I feel compelled to provide something worth all that time and effort. For exerting yourself in such a grand fashion, enjoy this link to Crime Zone, which is possibly the most brilliantly absurdist game I’ve ever played.

If you mean to the game/window area then yeah, that sucks and you would be pretty surprised by how many commercial games are like this. I never even noticed (or cared) until I got a second monitor. For the majority of game types this small decision to not capture the mouse completely can be game breaking.

In an FPS it means your mouse can end up on the other monitor and gets out of “sync”. In an RTS it means you can’t use the mouse to scroll at the edge of the screen etc…

Unity does have this option, but some developers don’t use it (or perhaps don’t know how to). seems like they use Screen.showCursor = false (which just hides it) instead of Screen.lockCursor = true (which hides it and locks it)

if any Unity devs are reading this, please make your games use Screen.lockCursor = true; !!

I played this the other day on freeindiegam.es (I expect it’ll be included in this weekend’s Live Free, Play Hard, too?) and just loved it. I had to play it twice–part because it was short and wonderful and part because it ends so abruptly I thought it may have been a bug or something. The second time through I was able to appreciate the abruptness.

Ok, actually I enjoyed it. It’s a good simulation of what it’s like to do history research: start out with enthusiasm, thinking you can accurately represent the past, and end up instead with masses of writhing bodies you don’t understand.

I got ahold of a bunch of class notes from one of the doyens of Inner Asian history, and they were pretty funny: ‘We don’t know much, and what we thought we knew was mostly wrong’. Hopefully it has gotten somewhat better in more recent times.